A resource on constructivism, focusing primarily on the movement in Russia and east-central Europe from the late 1910s through the 1930s.

The page contains an overview of major exhibitions and catalogues, selection of works, list of (digitised) magazines, pamphlets and books, anthologies of texts (also merged into a single table), historical studies and analyses, and profiles of artists, theorists and groups.

The First Russian Art Exhibition [Erste russische Kunstausstellung] opened at Galerie van Diemen in Berlin on 15 October 1922, with over 1,000 objects by c180 artists: 237 paintings, more than 500 graphic works, sculptures, as well as designs for theater, architectural models, and porcelain. The exhibition's official host was the Russian Ministry for Information, and it was put together by the artists Gabo, David Sterenberg, and Nathan Altman. Version of the exhibition later travelled to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in April-May 1923.

New Art Exhibition [Wystawa Nowej Sztuki], organised by Strzemiński and Kairiūkštis in Vilnius on May-June 1923. The works included painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, scenography, and print; cubist, constructivist, and suprematist compositions predominated. The 7 exhibiting artists went on to form the Blok collective.

First Zenit International Exhibition of New Art [Прва Зенитова међународна изложба нове уметности], organised by Micić in April 1924 in Belgrade. Featured one hundred works advertised as "futurism, cubism, expressionism, ornamental cubism, suprematism, constructivism, neoclassicism and the like".

The a.r. International Collection of Modern Art, donated by a.r. group to the Municipal Museum of History and Art (now Museum of Art; Museum Sztuki) in Łódź, opened to the public in February 1931. It included 111 works and represented - as no other contemporary European collection had done - the main movements of avant-garde art, from Cubism, Futurism and Constructivism, through Purism and Surrealism, to Neo-Plasticism, Unism and Formism.

Alexander Rodchenko, "Ellipse" from his Second Series of Spatial Constructions, 1920-21. Plywood, open construction partially painted with aluminum paint, and wire. 61x84x47 cm. MoMA. More works in the series.

Naum Gabo (Н. Габо), Nathan Pevsner (Нотон Певзнер), Realisticheskii manifest [Реалистический манифест], Moscow: Second State Printing House, 5 Aug 1920, 1 sheet (58.8x73.6 cm — edition of 5000). Manuscript. Issued as a poster to accompany the artists' joint open-air exhibition on Tverskoie Boulevard. Points out the limitations of cubism and futurism, outlining the principles for a new sculptural technique; in the 1923 version for G compressed into four points: the importance of life as the starting point for art, the emphasis on space and time, the rejection of mass, and the espousal of kinetic rhythms as a means of expressing time. Written by Gabo, signed also by Pevzner. Issued as a poster to accompany the artists' joint open-air exhibition on Tverskoie Boulevard, which opened 6 Aug. In a note written ca. in the 1970s, Gabo stated that the manifesto poster was stuck up all over Moscow by students from the Vkhutemas (at this point still the Free Studios) on the second day of the exhibition, 7 Aug. 1967 recording of Gabo reading the manifesto. Discussed in Lodder 1983: 38-40, Khan-Magomedov 1996 (RU). (Russian)

"The Monument to the Third International", trans. Christina Lodder, in Art in Theory, 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 1992, pp 311-315. Trans. made in 1983 for the Open University. (English)

Anthologised texts

A collection of texts from selected English-language anthologies (ToC = Bann 1974, RAA = Bowlt 1976, AiT = Harrison & Wood 1992, BW = Benson & Forgács 2002, LoR = Tsivian 2004). Links in the fourth column lead to versions of the texts as they appear in the anthologies, together with editorial introductions. The last column represents themes. Most of the columns are sortable.